Tag Archives: prose poem

One night, my roommate walked in on me,
Knife in hand, cutting away
(I had a sliver of glass in my skin,
And it was easier to cut to the bone
Than to live with the sting)

The other day, I dropped a lead weight
On my foot, and as soon as I convinced myself
It wasn’t broken, I went back to work
(At four in the morning, when the ache
Had grown too great, I drilled through
A toe to relieve the pressure from the bruise)

(Which is all to say,
There is so much I have excised
From my life,
So much I have cut away for making me weak,
So little I hold onto after the first time it hurts me)

(Which is all to say,
For me to keep you so close to my heart,
I must want you more than I want my own blood)

Like this:

This is how I haunt myself: with creaking floorboards and rustling curtains in a house gone silent; with lights flickering in broken windows against a moonless sky; with laughter and sobbing and anger and joy in a space that has not known the warmth of life in years.

This is how I haunt myself: with superstition and ritual, asking cold entrails in an empty room if a ghost still loves me.

Like this:

So, if you read my blog at all regularly, you’ve probably noticed that I don’t usually work ahead. This means that I’m often working off half-formed ideas, making stuff up as I go along, improvising, etc. The unfortunate honest truth is that it also means I often don’t even recall the specific details of what I write.

If you don’t use wordpress, you might not know that it tracks your blog’s stats, showing you what countries you’re getting readers from, what posts are being read, what search terms are leading folks to your blog, etc. Today I got some views from Canada that came from someone googling, “define friendulate.” I could not believe I’ve ever used the term “friendulate” in a story, so I immediately started doing some sleuthing.

Turns out I used it twice. Here and here. And now I’m going to make it a point to use it much more often because evidently it drives traffic to my blog.

As the song says, blame Canada.

Anyway! Here’s some prose poetry about bones!

There’s a skeleton inside you.

There’s a you inside you, shining like pearl.

A you in the same shape as you but separate.

A you that existed before you, the scaffold upon which you were built.

A you of sharp edges where you have soft curves, of sharp claws where you have fleshy fingers.

A you that would never get tired. A you that would never get hungry.

A you that would never grow cold, never grow old.

A you of unbreakable stone, where you are weak flesh.

A you that will exist after you.

There’s a skeleton inside you. And it wants so desperately to get out.